Sport Political football: Is sport today a
The English are celebrating England’s recent domination of the European league competitions, but how ‘English’ are their top clubs?
English football celebrated because all four finalists in the Uefa Champions League and Europa League finals were from one country: England. But is this achievement a reason to celebrate or should it be a cause for concern?
You probably don’t know David Vance, but you must know at least one David Vance. Were it not for social media, they wouldn’t exist.
Pasty, male and as English as a pork pie, Vance is the very picture of impotent white rage of a certain age. He’s from that time when all was right with the world, before they ruined everything by forcing us to allow married women to watch the Olympics.
Last month Vance tweeted to the more than 82 000 followers under his rock: “Last night, Barcelona. Tonight. Ajax. Johnny Foreigner shown a bloody nose. Rule Brittania!”
It’s unfortunate he can’t spell Britannia, but also unimportant. What matters is the untruth Vance and his ilk are trying to peddle: his message earned more than 340 retweets and almost 2 000 likes.
“A great night for English football” was heralded up and down the land of Saint George. On May 7, at home at Anfield, Liverpool found a way to put four unanswered goals past Barcelona, who had won the first leg of their Uefa Champions League semifinal 3-0 six days earlier at Camp Nou. Then Tottenham Hotspur, beaten 1-0 by Ajax Amsterdam in their new, £1-billion stadium in north London, won the second leg 3-2 to set up a Liverpool-spurs final in Madrid on June 1.
Arsenal and Chelsea reached the Europa League final played in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday May 29, which Chelsea won 4-1. Three days later, Liverpool were crowned kings of Europe for a sixth time, thanks to their 2-0 win over Spurs.
How English are these teams?
For the first time, all four teams in the two showpiece matches of the European season are from one country. Or are they? How English are Liverpool, Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea? Not nearly as much as Vance and his cohort of cretins would have the unsuspecting believe.
John W Henry II, the son of Illinois soybean farmers, owns Liverpool. Arsenal belongs to “Silent Stan” Kroenke, who hails from the Missouri hamlet of Mora, where he cut his teeth in capitalism by sweeping the floor at his father’s lumber company using a broom much taller than he was. By the age of 10, he was doing the books.
The look of Kroenke’s surname might make him seem Jewish. He isn’t, but Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, is. As are Joe Lewis — born above a pub in Bow, deep in London’s East End — and Essex-born David Levy, Spurs’ proprietors. None of which is likely to please the friendly neighbourhood far rightists, who also won’t want to learn that Saint George was born in Turkey to a Syrian mother.
Liverpool is managed by Jürgen Klopp and Spurs by Mauricio Pochettino. Maurizio Sarri is in charge at Chelsea and Unai Emery at Arsenal. They are from Germany, Argentina, Italy and Spain, respectively. Of the 121 players on the books of these four clubs, 78 are not English.
Just one Englishman started in the Europa League final. Seven were in the 22 for the Champions League showdown. Not one of the seven goals scored in those games was the work of an Englishman. Only one of the 16 goals scored across both legs of the semifinals was — by Chelsea’s Ruben Loftus-cheek. And he, like six of the nine goal scorers in both semis and finals, is not white.
Because that’s what this “football’s coming home” bumph is really about. It flies on the same wings as the racist “great white hope” narrative that used to taint boxing. It’s bound up with Britain’s historical tendency, and England’s in particular, to take what they want from other countries and those countries’ people, use them up and, once that’s done, discard them and deride them as uncivilised and backward. They can be colonised and subjugated every which way, but they should never be considered — especially not by themselves — as British. It’s a lesson players such as Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling, born black and in Jamaica, but with 49 senior England caps to his name, continues to be taught by opposition fans and, snidely, the tabloids.
From a South African perspective, you can trace this line through the 1913 Natives Land Act, the law that originally left only 7% of the country in the hands of the black people who had always called it home. One of the key motivations for the act was the need for a workforce to dig the gold out of the mines, which were Britishand European-owned.
Forced off the land, black people provided that workforce. For their next trick, the colonisers conjured from the ranks of relatively lowerclass white South Africans a stratum of management to keep all those black people in line. Thus divided and ruled. South Africa was ripe for the formalisation of apartheid from 1948. It’s not a long leap from there to recognise the 13 European mega